So now we're less than a week away from the staged reading of my play A RIVER IN THE DESERT at Gorilla Theatre and I get an e-mail from John Fleming, arts critic for the St. Petersburg Times. What he wants to know is, isn't it a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of such a conflict, for me to have a reading at a theater that I also review? And further, isn't this also the case with the full production of my play ART PEOPLE at The Studio at 620 later in the spring? Am I perhaps being unethical? Please comment. I call him immediately and leave a message on his voice mail. Then, this morning, he calls me at home and asks for a response. I tell him this: During the ten years that I've been theater critic for Creative Loafing, I've made it a policy never to ask a local theater to produce one of my plays. I've always felt that that would be putting an intolerable pressure on the theater's artistic director, who might worry that I would review his theater's work negatively if he/she didn't produce my work. But last year, Bob Devin Jones of The Studio@620 asked me to be one of the writers interviewed in the Studio's writers series.